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Extremely interesting stuff. I've been listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast series on the Wrath of the Khans (http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php?page=hharchive). I think that description, along with the video, do a good job explaining just how significantly advanced Mongol warriors were compared to their enemies.

An experienced eye will notice that on that video the archer is using a very soft bow which is very easy to draw. Such a bow is worthless in real combat - you can see the arrows barely penetrate the target. Also, such a rapid rate of fire (if it was possible with a combat bow, which it is not) would deplete the archer's arrows in a very short time, leaving him with an empty quiver. This is not a legitimate combat tactic.

Also, the "180 pound English longbow" of the past is believed by expert archers to be just a legend. Even a 60 pound bow is impossible to draw by a strong person with no experience in archery, and virtually nobody today can successfully shoot a bow stronger than 120 pounds (only 1 person had done it. It's harder than pulling a 120 pound dumbbell with one arm and holding it up http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwwy5Z1QTXI 65 kg - about 140 pounds) . Those medieval bowmen were undoubtedly well trained and strong, but to believe a regular peasant (bowmen were conscripted en masse from the lower class) were stronger than a today's professional weightlifter borders with fantasy.

Okay, I have to point out that you're completely wrong about the longbow. Such bows have been found on shipwrecks like the Mary Rose, and are not 'impossible' to draw. They are impossible for modern archers to draw. Skeletons of English archers from that era suggest enormous upper body strength. And as such archers did not have to hold the bow fully drawn for more than a split second (which you'd never guess from hollywood movies) they didn't require the kind of strength you describe.

Professional medieval longbowmen, or "conscripted peasants" as you called them, took a very long time to train, starting in childhood, and working their way up various training bows of increasing draw strength until they reached the 'real' bow.

The fact that they took so long to train was a problem that led to the English losing France in the hundred years war - the French managed to corner a large number of English archers in an unprepared position in one battle, and killed most of them. Such men were irreplaceable at short notice, and after that point it became increasingly difficult for the English to win a battle using their traditional tactics. It had very little to do with Joan of Arc.

EDIT: BTW, upvoted you despite my disagreement. Please don't downvote people who are contributing to a discussion, everybody.

EDIT2: By the way, in the linked article, it is claimed that the English did not fire from horseback. This is probably not true. At the battle of Crecy, the English had ~2500 horse archers, who dismounted and fought on foot alongside their infantry equivalent. We do also have painted images of English soldiers firing longbows from horseback, and we're not sure whether or not they were used in this capacity regularly.

I find it very difficult to believe that people in the medieval era could compare in fitness or strength to those of today.

Why? That is a ridiculous assertion to make. Have you ever boxed, or done other forms of martial art? If so, you'll know that after several rounds of intense effort, you're exhausted. Sweat is pouring off you. Imagine doing it all wearing 80 pounds of plate armour, with additional maile, leather, and a weapon weighting upwards of 20 pounds, and try training that way for hours.

I'm fairly fit, and I tried it without the armour, and under direction, with a twenty pound sword, and my shoulders felt like they were on fire after 5 minutes. Professional soldiers of that era were no less fit than those of the modern era.

Fitness is activity specific. Unless you regularly train to be fit in a particular discipline, you will never be able to do what people dedicated to that discipline are able to do.

If people could do it then, they most certainly can do it now.

So your assertion is that someone who picks up a bow today should be able to do what it took someone ten or more years of professional dedicated practise to learn 600 years ago?

Just a note: 20 pound swords are bullshit. Very large cerimonial swords were made that weighed 10+ pounds, but swords made and used for combat were generally about 3 pounds, and pretty much never more than 5. This includes 2-handed longswords with 45 inch blades.

So your assertion is that someone who picks up a bow today should be able to do what it took someone ten or more years of professional dedicated practise to learn 600 years ago?

Yes, if they are professional archers.

Fitness is not totally activity specific. There is a baseline that is defined by strength, speed, endurance, agility, coordination, balance. It is built up through normal activities, nutrition, sleep, fitness training, etc. All of which are vastly superior today than at any other point of time in history. Muscles are bigger, muscle activation is faster, limbs are bigger, weights are greater, heights are taller. To say that humans hundreds's of years ago were as fit as the fittest humans today is laughable. The absolute highest performers of today are the highest performers of all time.

The difference is training for a particular skill, such as archery. But there are professional archers today. And there are people stronger than any archer in the past. If they train for archery as a full time sport, with all the advantages of modern health, training, and knowledge, they would have every possible advantage over any individual 600 years ago. There is absolutely no reason why someone today could not replicate anything physical done in the past to a greater degree of success, if they dedicated themselves to training for it.

Modern professional archers presumably train for accuracy, they are not concerned with penetrative powers of their "weapon". There is absolutely no reason for a modern professional archer to train their way up to firing a bow with a draw weight of 180lbs, such as those found on the Mary Rose. There would be no reason for them to do it as part of their sport. There would be no reason for them to put up with the associated injuries, bone spurs, and spinal curvature that arise from using a large longbow, let alone spend the hours of practise required working their way up through various training bows.

The idea that the longbows with draw weights of 180lbs didn't exist, despite the fact that we've found them, because "no modern man can draw one, and we're better than those medieval chaps" seems to me simply denial.

"[My yeoman father] taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow ... not to draw with strength of arms as divers other nations do ... I had my bows bought me according to my age and strength, as I increased in them, so my bows were made bigger and bigger. For men shall never shoot well unless they be brought up to it." —Hugh Latimer. What Latimer meant when he describes laying his body into the bow was described thus: "the Englishman did not keep his left hand steady, and draw his bow with his right; but keeping his right at rest upon the nerve, he pressed the whole weight of his body into the horns of his bow. Hence probably arose the phrase "bending the bow," and the French of "drawing" one.

This post is pretty spot on. It's also worth remembering that when you have thousands of archers deployed en masse, firing against large formations of enemy troops, pinpoint accuracy is not at all important. English longbowman hardy fired at random, but they weren't trying to shoot straight through someone's visor every time. Distance, penetration and rate of fire were their watchwords, particularly when using high angle shots at long range. It's also important to remember the psychological effect of massed arrow fire, which was often as important as the injuries and deaths caused. Most medieval battles were won by breaking the morale of the enemy forces, and it could be argued that this was the true strength of the English longbow, particularly when English archers started to develop a near-mythic reputation throughout Europe.

Go to a rural farm in Eastern Europe or Central Asia somewhere and see how they live. A farm where they keep and slaughter they own animals, having a steady supply of protein. Where they do heavy work all day and older women's shoulders are broader than those of Western men.

You're also talking about knowledge that is available for the lay today. It's true we have more knowledge, but that doesn't mean that militaries throughout history didn't have similar knowledge. It was their business to train and make the strongest soldiers possible and after, oh I don't know, 10,000+ years of warfare they've managed to pick up a good set of strength training techniques.

Also, the assumption that today's athletes are better than the world has seen is probably only 90% right. I don't think that we have the best endurance runners the world has ever seen. I don't even think we have the fastest sprinters. There were footprints preserved in Africa somewhere of a sprinting man whose stride length suggests that he was faster than Usain Bolt, and he was running though muddy sand at the time, preserving the footprints. The documentary suggested that there was a whole community in Africa that revered fast sprinting and children trained from a very young age to be as fast as they can.

Yeah, the talent pool has increased exponentially because of proper nutrition and knowledge available to regular people, but I don't necessarily think that it means our specialists are that much better than specialists of history.

Oh, also don't forget generational knowledge and selection for a trait. Like with the runners in Africa, I am sure the fastest of the fast got laid a lot more producing faster and faster children. And then it repeats. And again it repeats. I also think the strongest genes for ultimate fitness have not even been introduced to the modern, urban world. Those people are still hidden in farms somewhere, being a result of hundreds of generations of selection for strength and endurance.

Normal activities like, say, performing hard physical labour all day long, day in day out, all around the year, from early childhood? Something most people did before the industrial revolution, but few do today? I'd say that's a pretty solid basis for general fitness.

That just means the fitness of the general population is probably lower. However, that doesn't apply to athletes, especially ones who had parents that stressed athletic fitness from a young age.

The science of fitness has improved dramatically just in the past few decades (and still has a long ways to go). This is empirically proven by Olympic records getting continuously broken, or how NFL strategies have changed to account of the fact that linebackers can now hold a lot of bulk while also being really fast. Some of this is no doubt due to steroids, of course, but not all of it.

It's safe to assume that the best athletes today, be it to a specific sport or more general, are the fittest people who ever lived.

You can gain better endurance and more power in a few years of proper training than decades of the same physical activity at the same intensity level. When combined with general poor health, terrible nutrition, and lack of medical care, it's not even the same realm.

Today's professional archers are very different from the professional archers of that time. There's even a wide variety among today's archers, and you can't expect someone who does well with one style to instantly be good at another style. A professional indoor freestyle shooter isn't going to be an expert at indoor barebow traditional, and neither of them is going to do well with a professional olympic recurve. Even an olympic recurve shooter, isn't going to do well with an english longbow. Outside of reenactors, noone trains to shoot bows with 120lb draw weights.

It's certainly possible for today's humans to train to do what ancient archers did, but we don't.

Only extremely active weightlifters and bodybuilders have the strength to pull 150+lbs with one arm. And most of them are doing them as rowing movements engaging the general back muscles, meaning they're not standing upright trying to aim at something (these archers back then must have had ridiculous shoulders). There are lots of such people but they get there through years of training. So I'm not sure where your confidence in people today comes from. Most of the strong ones train to get strong at large compound movements, so we have lifters who can deadlift/squat several hundred pounds, but there's not many folks out there trying to do this. Virtually nobody trains to have upper body strength like the kind you need for these bows anymore. Mostly because shoulders are so easy to hurt and it's not worth screwing up your ability to compete in bench/deadlift/squat just to have giant delts.

People are the same now as they were then. Although we live longer and stay healthier longer.

Their nutrition wasn't that bad either back then. Especially since this was life long training done very slowly and progressively.

OK, the rest of your post aside, I have to say that I completely disagree with your assertion that a novice archer could not even pull back a 60lb bow. That is just false. I own both 50 and 60lb traditional recurve bows and even my (small) girlfriend can draw back the 50. I had no problem with the 60 when I began. Granted I was not particularly accurate to begin with but I improved quickly and that was mostly down to technique. The physical act of drawing it back has never been an issue.

It sounds like people are also making the assumption that they are doing a full draw; a full draw at 120 pounds would be pretty fucking impressive, but pulling back a shorter distance and letting go (for a much smaller amount of force) doesn't seem unreasonable.

With a lot of practice, I think it would be possible to develop this technique and use it in heavier 50-60 lb bows (meaning that these short motions would yield a greater effect). Mongol children were trained on the backs of movie sheep while very young, and it was a way of life for them. I don't doubt that possibility. On a side note, I actually wonder if it wasn't the norm to have bows that at full draw would have 160+ lbs, and only ever shoot with short, quick draws that tossed 40-60 lbs of force.

Also, one related point no one talks about is that the double recurve bow - the Mongolian, hun, Turkish, Tatar, avar, Scythian, etc - is more efficient at transferring the weight of the draw to the arrow. In my completely unscientific personal tests, my Scythian 35# can shoot farther than my friend's longbow when shot at a similar angle. Something worth noting, as longbow to recurve to double recurve is an apple to oranges to bananas comparison in terms of arrow speed/distance. Again, based on my anecdotal evidence and therefore in my opinion. Obviously this wasn't in response to what you said, but just tacked on in the middle of this reply.

Lastly, you mentioned that an archer's arrows would quickly run out. True, but these were mounted warriors with a hit and run military style. Multiple large quivers on horses, coupled with re-arming stations would solve this issue. Arrow supplies would be high from a culture in which archery is a way of life to this extent. Actually, the Parthians (many generations before the Mongols) would have camels loaded with quivers of arrows and spears and send them into combat with their army to re-supply.

Please don't take my reply as an attack (not assuming you will, but in these types of threads in the Internet, it happens). I made an effort to explain my opinion based on what I've learned, my experience with the same style of bow, and a fair amount of guesswork.

I recently read a very good novel that was about an English archer around the 1400's. It's written by Bernard Cornwell who does, as far as I know from reading the notes in the back, a lot of research.
In this book, Azincourt, the British longbow is very important as the main person is an archer. So I guess that if you enjoy reading and archery and old battles, read it.
Also, Bernard is very graphic and detailed in describing battles, same as in the Sharpe series.

Oh I know. What I wanted to say (English isn't my first language, so please excuse me) was that it's a great book with a prominent place for the longbow. So if you are already interested in ancient archery and enjoy a good book, I recommend it.

The main reason I posted this here is because it's about archery and people already interested in that are probably in here.

But you are right, I should have made it more clear that although the it's full of historical facts, the story is pretty much made up. And yes, it's great for capturing a 'feel', not for getting, for example, the numbers two sides in a battle had. Although he does comment on the discrepancies he found while researching Azincourt.

The fascination you show with romanticized images of the past is ... well, fascinating. It is, however, also, just a romantic fantasy. English archers with "enormous" body strenght and 5 yo Mongol children galloping across the steppe, not getting a meal until they hit a pigeon with their bow. Novelists love that stuff. Paradoxically, historians also do - they are suckers for battles, mighty kings, etc., making up for their otherwise dry and unexciting profession. Reading a history book, one might think medieval people spend most of their time going to war, and war and battle were the most important events in history.

I hate to spoil the fun, but in the past people were not superheroes. They were mostly underfed, poorly equipped and dragged across the country for a disorganized, muddy clash, which would be described in a manuscript by a monk who was not there, would be painted on a wall by an artist who could barely read and had never seen combat in his life, and would be called a battle by a historian 500 years later. Get real, guys.

The fascination you show with romanticized images of the past is ... well, fascinating. It is, however, also, just a romantic fantasy.

Get real, guys.

I'm not sure I understand your problem... People are interested in the weaponry and military tactics of the past - does that offend you? While much historical presentation is glamourised, the facts remain facts, and I personally find them quite intriguing.

Given the artifacts we have from the period, we know that longbows required significant strength to draw. We also know that training a longbowman took a long time, and a lot of dedication.

In a nomadic culture centred on horse-riding and archery, it is fairly obvious that children began to learn these skills at a young age, and the effectiveness of the Mongol forces is quite incontrovertible.

Basically, I wonder what exactly you are taking umbrage at. Factually, you haven't disproved anything; you've simply added a reminder that life and war were dirty experiences lacking the veneer of the paintings we are shown. Your comment just seems a lot more aggressive than its content would suggest is warranted.

Paradoxically, historians also do - they are suckers for battles, mighty kings, etc., making up for their otherwise dry and unexciting profession. Reading a history book, one might think medieval people spend most of their time going to war, and war and battle were the most important events in history.

Okay... so you're clearly not basing your little history lesson on, you know, history. What is it based on?

Reading your post, one might think that mighty kings and battles are the only things you are interested in.

Have you ever read a history book about a topic other than military history? Have you ever heard of cultural or social history, which are about studying people who couldn't be more normal? Military history and romantic battles are a very tiny part of the study of history.

The emphasis you place on medieval combat is fascinating and your criticism of the study of history reeks of projection.